A small, local news outlet with a name like “Pleasanton Weekly” doesn’t sound very threatening, but according to an email sent to the Daily Caller, the publication has some journalistic teeth that the White House thought needed to be filed down — specifically, the choppers that made Michelle Obama come across as snooty:

A small weekly paper in California claims that a White House official asked it to remove a sentence from a “benign” feature about Marine One because it reflected poorly on first lady Michelle Obama.
[…]
The story in question was a soft feature about Marine One titled, “Inside Marine One, President Obama’s helicopter,” that ran in the paper on April 20. Pleasanton staffer Amory Gutierrez “didn’t get to ride in ‘Marine One,’” she wrote in her story, “but I did get the VIP tour and took photographs of the otherwise unseen aircraft.”

She also wrote a sentence that the White House thought made FLOTUS look snooty.

“Basically the reporter said that the First Lady didn’t speak to the pilots but acknowledged them by making eye contact,” Allen wrote in her email.

Allen says she “complied” with the White House’s request “because it was not worth making a fuss over.”

This little band of California rabble-rousers might just be a small operation, but the White House can never be too careful in keeping them in check. One day it’s the Pleasanton Weekly, but the next thing they know it’s ballooned into the San Francisco Chronicle.